Background. Medical image registration is an essential task for medical image analysis in various applications. In this work, we develop a coarse-to-fine medical image registration method based on progressive images and SURF algorithm (PI-SURF) for higher registration accuracy. Methods. As a first step, the reference image and the floating image are fused to generate multiple progressive images. Thereafter, the floating image and progressive image are registered to get the coarse registration result based on the SURF algorithm. For further improvement, the coarse registration result and the reference image are registered to perform fine image registration. The appropriate progressive image has been investigated by experiments. The mutual information (MI), normal mutual information (NMI), normalized correlation coefficient (NCC), and mean square difference (MSD) similarity metrics are used to demonstrate the potential of the PI-SURF method. Results. For the unimodal and multimodal registration, the PI-SURF method achieves the best results compared with the mutual information method, Demons method, Demons+B-spline method, and SURF method. The MI, NMI, and NCC of PI-SURF are improved by 15.5, 1.31, and 7.3, respectively, while MSD decreased by 13.2 for the multimodal registration compared with the optimal result of the state-of-the-art methods. Conclusions. The extensive experiments show that the proposed PI-SURF method achieves higher quality of registration.

The accurate detection and classification of pavement damage are critical for ensuring timely maintenance and extending the service life of road infrastructure. In this study, we propose a novel pavement damage recognition model based on the Swin Transformer architecture, specifically designed to address the challenges inherent in pavement imagery, such as low damage visibility, varying illumination conditions, and highly similar surface textures. Unlike the original Swin Transformer, the proposed model incorporates two key components: a fine feature extraction module and a multi-head self-attention re-embedding module. These additions enhance the model’s ability to capture subtle and complex damage patterns. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that the proposed model achieves a 2.07% improvement in classification accuracy and a 0.97% increase in F1 score compared to the baseline while maintaining comparable computational complexity. Overall, the model significantly outperforms the baseline Swin Transformer in pavement damage detection and classification, highlighting its practical applicability.

In recent years, deep learning has made successful applications and remarkable achievements in the field of medical image registration, and the method of medical image registration based on deep learning has become the current research hotspot. However, the performance of convolutional neural networks may not be fully exploited due to neglect of spatial relationships between distant locations in the image and incomplete updates of network parameters. To avoid this phenomenon, MHNet, a multiscale hierarchical deformable registration network for 3D brain MR images, was proposed in this paper. This network was an unsupervised end-to-end convolutional neural network. After training, the dense displacement vector field can be predicted almost in real-time for the unseen input image pairs, which saves a lot of time compared with the traditional algorithms of independent iterative optimization for each pair of images. On the basis of the encoder-decoder structure, this network introduced the improved Inception module for multiscale feature extraction and expanding the receptive field and the hierarchical forecast structure to promote the update of the parameters of the middle layers, which achieved the best performance on the augmented public dataset compared with the existing four excellent registration methods.

With the rapid development of online social networks recently, more and more online users have participated in social network activities and rich social relationships are formed accordingly. These social relationships provide a rich data source and research basis for in-depth study on recommender systems (RSs), while also promoting the development of RSs based on social networks. To solve the problems of cold start and sparsity in RSs, many recommendation algorithms are constantly being proposed. Motivated by the availability of rich social connections in today’s RSs, a large number of recommendation techniques based on social relationships have been proposed recently, achieving good recommendation results, and have become the mainstream research direction in the field of RSs, attracting more and more researchers to engage in this research. In this study, we mainly review and summarize the social relationship-based recommendation methods and techniques in RSs, and study some recent deep social relationship recommendation methods and techniques based on deep learning (DL), including the latest social matrix factorization (MF)-based recommendation methods and graph neural network (GNN)-based recommendation methods. Finally, we discuss the potential impact that may improve the RS and future direction. In this article, we aim to introduce the recent recommendation techniques integrating social relationships to solve data sparsity and cold start, and provide a new perspective for improving the performance of RSs, thereby providing useful resources in the state-of-the-art research results for future researchers.

Pavement damage classification is crucial for road maintenance and driving safety. However, restricted to the varying scales, irregular shapes, small area ratios, and frequent overlap with background noise, traditional methods struggle to achieve accurate recognition. To address these challenges, a novel pavement damage classification model is designed based on the MambaOut named Multi-scale Damage Enhancement MambaOut (MDEM). The model incorporates two key modules to improve damage classification performance. The Multi-scale Dynamic Feature Fusion Block (MDFF) adaptively integrates multi-scale information to enhance feature extraction, effectively distinguishing visually similar cracks at different scales. The Damage Detail Enhancement Block (DDE) emphasizes fine structural details while suppressing background interference, thereby improving the representation of small-scale damage regions. Experiments were conducted on multiple datasets, including CQU-BPMDD, CQU-BPDD, and Crack500-PDD. On the CQU-BPMDD dataset, MDEM outperformed the baseline model with improvements of 2.01% in accuracy, 2.64% in precision, 2.7% in F1-score, and 4.2% in AUC. The extensive experimental results demonstrate that MDEM significantly surpasses MambaOut and other comparable methods in pavement damage classification tasks. It effectively addresses challenges such as varying scales, irregular shapes, small damage areas, and background noise, enhancing inspection accuracy in real-world road maintenance.

Person re-identification can quickly locate and find all the specified targets in complex scenes with multiple cameras, which has been widely applied in intelligent video surveillance and security system. As a state-of-art method proposed recently, ResNet exhibits promising performances on person re-identification. However, without intermediate fully connected layer, ResNet fails to fully grasp the global information in the detection process. To overcome the above problem, this paper proposes a person re-identification method named RG-BoTNet by fusing the Relation-aware Global Attention mechanism into BoTNet. Since relation-aware global attention is good at grasping the global information of the image, RG-BoTNet is powerful in extracting personal features. The good performances conducted on cuhk03 dataset in terms of Mean Average Precision (MAP) and Rank-1demonstrate the effectiveness of RG-BoTNet for person re-identification task.